Storm Warning - Echoes of Conflict (Paperback)

Haunting, sometimes shocking, always thought-provoking. Storm Warning is the latest collection from award-winning writer Vanessa Gebbie, a writer described as 'prodigiously gifted' by novelist Maggie Gee. Storm Warning explores the echoes of human conflict in a series of powerful stories and flashes inspired by life with the author's own father, an ordinary and gentle man who fought and was decorated in WWII, but who suffered the after-effects for the rest of his life. The conflicts range from conventional warfare through violent tribal clashes to historical religious persecution. Gebbie's viewpoints are never predictable. War veterans are haunted by events that echo louder and louder, and eventually break them, or they struggle to maintain normal relationships. A prisoner sees the violent execution of a friend and mentor, a boy hides from a necklacing, a young student escapes the fighting in Iraq in the hope of continuing his education in the West, a woman tells what she knows of her parents' torture and a naive kitemaker takes kites to children in Afghanistan with disastrous consequences. Echoes of conflict are often explored from the child's perspective. A young girl witnesses an attempted escape over the Berlin Wall. Another is present when her grandfather, a writer, is targeted by the Russian Cultural Revolution, and two small boys are unwilling bystanders to atrocities in African inter-tribal conflicts. The people in these stories are not those who go down in history. They are the ordinary troops. They are the powerless, caught up involuntarily. All are tested, sometimes to breaking point, in this extraordinary collection as Gebbie pulls no punches, exploring the surreality of conflict, the after-effects of atrocity and sometimes, the seeds of atrocity itself.